David Chisnall arrived at the Swansea University in 2000, looked at the sun and sea, and decided to stay there. Three years and one degree later, he was no longer under the illusion that the sun was a regular feature, but was persuaded to remain for another degree by the promise of a desk with a view of the sea. During his time as a PhD student, he worked hard at the best known of postgraduate activities: procrastination. This involved writing portions of A Practical Guide to RedHat Linux, Second Edition and regular articles for InformIT and a local tech news startup (which, as these are prone to do, has since gone bust). He is a founding member and core developer of the Étoilé project, which aims to build an open source user environment based for desktop and mobile computing systems.

In spite of his best efforts, he managed to do some research in the areas of out of core pre-fetching algorithms and system simulation, and it wasn't long before his supervisor started reminding him that a thesis was a requirement of a PhD. Knowing that a large task required an even larger distraction, he also agreed to write a book on the workings of Xen. This appeared to work, and he was able to complete his thesis within a fortnight of sending the complete draft to the publisher. He has since re-discovered sleep, and taken up dancing salsa while enjoying the (temporary) lack of deadlines.

Wesley J. Chun, MSCS, is author of Prentice Hall’s bestseller, Core Python Programming, Second Edition (corepython.com), and coauthor of Python Web Development with Django (withdjango.com). In addition to being a senior software architect, he runs CyberWeb (cyberwebconsulting.com), a consulting business specializing in Python software engineering and technical training. He has more than twenty-five years of programming, teaching, and writing experience, including more than a decade of Python. While at Yahoo!, he helped create Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! People Search using Python. He holds degrees in computer science, mathematics, and music from the University of California.

Paul Deitel is CEO, CTO, and cofounder of Deitel® & Associates, Inc., is coauthor of many of the world’s leading programming books, including the best-selling college textbook Java How to Program, Seventh Edition (Prentice Hall, 2007). Through Deitel® & Associates, Inc., he has delivered Java and other programming language courses to developers at dozens of the world’s leading organizations, including IBM, Sun Microsystems, Cisco, Fidelity, NASA, and many more.

Bill Giannattasio is a Senior Network Consultant and Trainer at Versatile Communications.  He is a seasoned information technology professional with extensive knowledge of ProCurve Networking by HP, Cisco and MITEL products as well as Microsoft and UNIX/Linux operating systems.  Bill’s hands-on experience includes the integration and troubleshooting of switches, routers, firewalls, wireless devices and VoIP phone systems, servers, desktop PCs, and laptops.  He also has in-depth and hands-on knowledge of how to plan, map and secure a network infrastructure.  Mr. Giannattasio possesses broad networking industry knowledge of competitors (such as Cisco, 3Com, Nortel, Intel) and of emerging technologies, and his real-world experience offers him the ability to provide a wide range of customers the technical information they need on products and solutions that address alternative or competitive technologies as well as configuration considerations.   Mr. Giannattasio has industry training and certifications in networking, security and wireless from vendors such as ProCurve Networking by HP, Cisco, Mitel, and RedHat.  He holds a Master level certification in both Secure Wireless and Convergence from ProCurve which encompasses their full range of networking products and a comprehensive, solution-oriented focus in Security and Wireless implementations.  Most importantly for ClassOnDemand, Mr. Giannattasio also does formal platform training for a variety of technical networking courses including course topics such as Secure WAN, Convergence, Security, Mobility and general networking.

Shon Harris, CISSP, MCSE, is president of Logical Security, a leading security consultant, a former engineer in the Air Force’s Information Warfare unit, and an instructor and author of several best-selling CISSP books and videos. She has been recognized by Information Security Magazine as one of the field’s top 25 women.

Scot Hillier manages the eBusiness unit for DataLan Corporation, a strategic consulting services company that is located in White Plains, NY. He has written six books, including MTS Programming with Visual Basic (Sams, 1999). In addition to his writing, Scot is also a regular speaker at industry events such as VBITS and Developer Days.

David Hucaby, CCIE No. 4594, is a lead network engineer for the University of Kentucky, where he works with healthcare networks based on the Cisco Catalyst, IP Telephony, PIX, and VPN product lines. David was one of the beta reviewers of the PIX version 7 Firewall operating system software.

Eric Johnson (MCSE, MCDBA, MCSD, CCNP) is a co-founder of Consortio Services, and the primary Database Technologies Consultant. His background in information technology is diverse, ranging from operating systems and hardware to specialized applications and development. He has even done his fair share of work on networks. Since IT is really just a way to support business processes, he has also acquired his MBA. All in all, he has 10 years of experience with IT, a great amount of which has been working with Microsoft SQL Server. Eric has managed and designed databases of all shapes and sizes. He has delivered numerous SQL Server training classes and webcasts as well as presentations at national technology conferences. Most recently, he presented at TechMentor on SQL Server 2005 Replication, Reporting Services, and Integration Services. He also does a good deal of writing, including the recent four-part series, Tour de SQL, published in Redmond magazine. In addition, he is active in the local SQL Server community, serving as the president of the Colorado Springs SQL Server Users' Group.

Arie D. Jones is Senior SQL Server database administrator and analyst for PTI in Indianapolis. He has written several books and articles pertaining to database related topics, the most recent is SQL Functions Programmer's Reference from Wrox.

Stephen Kochan is the author and coauthor of several bestselling titles on the C language, including Programming in C (Sams, 2004), Programming in ANSI C (Sams, 1994), and Topics in C Programming (Wiley, 1991), as well as several Unix titles, including Exploring the Unix System (Sams, 1992) and Unix Shell Programming (Sams 2003). He has been programming on Macintosh computers since the introduction of the first Mac in 1984, and he wrote Programming C for the Mac as part of the Apple Press Library. In 2003 Kochan wrote Programming in Objective-C (Sams, 2003), and followed that with another Mac-related title, Beginning AppleScript (Wiley, 2004).

John Lancaster is a ProCurve Accredited System Engineer (ASE) and has been a technical instructor for over 20 years. He has taught HP networking for the past 16 years. He instructs ProCurve customers, resellers, distributors and internal HP employees on topics that include ProCurve/Cisco interoperability, ProCurve management solutions and network security. In addition, John provides on-site consulting services advising customers on how best to take control of their networks.

Christian Montoya is a Social Game and Web Developer. He has created ad management software and led site design and user interface design teams. Montoya holds a B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Cornell University College of Engineering, Ithaca, NY.  He is currently the project lead for Blueprint, (http://blueprintcss.org/). 

Wendell Odom, CCIE No. 1624, has been in the networking industry since 1981. He has worked as a network engineer, consultant, systems engineer, instructor, and course developer; he currently works writing and creating certification tools. He is author of all the previous editions of the CCNA Exam Certification Guides from Cisco Press, as well as the CCNP ROUTE 642-902 Official Certification Guide, the CCIE Routing and Switching Official Exam Certification Guide, Computer Networking First Step, the CCNA Video Mentor, and other titles. He is also the primary networking consultant for the CCNA 640-802 Network Simulator. Wendell maintains lists of Cisco certification tools, suggestions, and links to his Cisco certification blog at www.certskills.com.

Dan Wahlin is a Senior Consultant at Integrated Information Systems, where he specializes in writing applications based on Microsoft's DNA platform. His work at IIS includes creating distributed applications for Fortune 500 companies using Visual Basic, COM+, ASP.NET, SQL Server, and of course XML. His involvement with XML goes back to Microsoft's introduction of the MSXML Version 1 parser, and Dan has been working with ASP.NET since its early stages. Several articles detailing Dan's involvement with XML related projects have been published on www.asptoday.com, a popular resource for ASP developers.

Marc Wandschneider has worked extensively with open source platforms, and has written an Outlook Express-style email client for Linux using Qt. He travels the globe, consulting as a lead manager for software projects and teams. A graduate of the McGill University School of Computer Science, he spent five years working for Microsoft, where he developed and managed developers on the Visual Basic, Visual J++, and .NET Windows Forms teams.